How To Choose: PPC or PPL Advertising

Digital marketing has been a ‘thing’ the past few years, and more companies are spending millions on attracting the right kind of audience. As such, choosing the right marketing strategy is essential in order to obtain that positive ROI. The most common marketing strategies to attract consumers include pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or pay-per-lead (PPL) advertising. Do they ring a bell? Before it gets more confusing, let’s dive into these terms!

Pay-per-click (PPC)

PPC refers to paying for each time a potential consumer clicks on your advertisement. It is a way of purchasing visits to your marketing campaign landing page, rather than relying on organic visits. One such example would be the search engine online advertising on Google Adword platform. These platforms allow advertisers to bid for an ad placement in the search engine page when consumers search for keywords that are related to the marketing campaign and business.

For example, if you are in the IT industry and someone searches ‘best IT services’ and your ad pops up, you will be charged for every click when they enter the landing page. As a rule of thumb, the higher the click traffic, the more expensive it will cost. If your company is in a highly competitive niche market, be prepared to pay more per click!

Every marketer loves PPC for its ease of use. It’s so easy that even beginners are able to start a marketing campaign in just a few minutes! Desirably, one should be receiving a positive ROI for every PPC marketing campaign. If not, you may not be doing it right, and here are some factors you need to take into consideration.

1. Target Audience

Just like any other marketing campaign, understanding your target market is a must! This will allow you to have a better focus when doing keyword research. Narrow your target audience into smaller segments. You may consider narrowing age group, interest or by gender, whichever relevant. In the long run, this will help you save money as lesser money are wasted on irrelevant and under performing keywords, which will be further elaborated in the next point.

2. Keyword Research

Every PPC campaign is built around keywords, so it is important to grow and refine your PPC keyword list. Do avoid targeting keywords that are too expensive or broad, think deeper! Look at long-tail, low-cost and highly relevant keywords that could potentially be driving traffic to your landing page. An effective PPC keyword list should be relevant, exhaustive and expansive! PPC is a great tool to reach a niche market, but you will definitely need to play around with the settings, such as limiting your campaign to reach potential consumers, and not just random people outside of the target market.

3. Implementing a Landing Page

For every advertisement, it is essential to have a landing page - it could be your website or a campaign page. In the landing page, a call to action or online forms needs to be implemented inside the page for consumers to enter their information. Keep your landing page simple and easy to read. Get straight to the point so that consumers know what the next steps are. In your form, some basic information may include their name, contact number and email address. This information will come in handy when the sales team is ready to pitch your product or services to them!

4. Tracking of Campaigns

It is important to implement tracking in your campaigns! This is to ensure that the money you have spent has been worth it. One example of a good (and free!) tracking tool includes Google analytics.

Why Choose PPC?

Overall, we find that PPC is easy to execute, but may be tedious and time-consuming in the long run. In order to optimize PPC fully, it is important to allocate some time off your daily work routine to keep track of the performance of the PPC campaigns. It is great for beginners, but in order to see instant results, it takes time to get a hang of PPC.

If your company is in the highly competitive market, is location-specific, has high margins and have seasonal value, you should get your hands on PPC now! Keep in mind that the list provided above is not exhaustive since almost any kind of business can use PPC marketing campaign to work for them. The objective here is to find the best keywords that drive affordable clicks to your landing page!

Pay-Per-Lead (PPL)

On the other hand, PPL is a type of cost-per-acquisition marketing campaign. Basically, you are paying for the delivery of potential consumers who have expressed interest in your company’s product or service through a chosen acquisition method such as subscription, form submission or sale.

The difference between PPC and PPL is that PPC is paying for clicks, while PPL is paying for every potential consumer. This means that the leads received will be lower and the price will be higher because each potential consumer has been pre-qualified by a third party referral partner. It works on a structure where the third party partner gets paid for generating a certain amount of potential leads on a monthly basis.

As mentioned above, PPL is definitely significantly more expensive than PPC. In order to make the bang out of your buck, here are a few tips before you start your PPL marketing campaign.

1. Determine Marketing Budget

Since one lead doesn’t come by cheap, it is essential to determine how much your company is willing to spend per lead. Before you determine, you would need to take the lifetime value and high margin profit per consumer into consideration. For example, the lifetime value of your company’s consumer is approximately $5,000. To gain a potential consumer, you might be willing to spend around 10% of the lifetime value, which sums up to about $5,000. As such, for each potential consumer, the cost per acquisition is about $500.

Because of the large amount of money to acquire a potential consumer, it is important to monitor the leads to make sure that the average cost per lead is within budget and efficiently spent. This could be done together with the sales team to increase sales rates, which will be further elaborated in the next point!

2. A Solid Sales Team

After spending so much on acquiring potential consumers, a strong sales team is necessary to pitch your company’s service or product to the potential leads. Because of the higher amount spent on PPL than PPC per lead, your company’s sales team might need to customize its pitching approach based on every potential consumer. Although this may sound tedious, it should be manageable, especially when the number of leads from PPL is significantly lower than PPC marketing campaigns.

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Why Choose PPL?

If the price is a factor that is turning you away from PPL, think twice! Although PPC is cheaper, PPL works within a certain budget, which makes your acquisition cost more predictable. Generally, you are paying for results, leads that have higher potential to be converted into actual sales. To minimize budget, you might have to set certain predetermined criteria on the leads delivered, such as the type of industry etc.

We believe that PPL is suitable for companies that either has trouble generating enough leads or are in a targeted industry such as B2B markets. Some examples, but not limited to, include marketing agencies, financial services, professional services, real estate and education services companies. Do take note that PPL is best for companies who know what type of potential consumers you are looking at!

Which Is Better - PPC or PPL?

If you are struggling to choose between PPC or PPL, you don’t have to! Why not implement both but use it as different marketing strategies? For a start, you may want to start with PPC to generate brand awareness and obtain leads at a lower cost. After that, you may start to acquire better and more expensive leads through PPL marketing campaigns. After a few months of trying out, you may consult your fellow marketing colleagues and sales team for opinions on which works better for them and the company.

As proven above, you don’t have to choose between the two marketing campaigns. Both types of marketing campaigns have their own respective benefits and disadvantages. It will be good if both marketing campaigns can complement each other and help your company generate sales. Perhaps there is no ‘better’ marketing campaign type, but finding a desirable marketing strategy that fits your company best. Good luck, don’t give up!